Naturally, a question to arise from a concept such as ES is something like, “Which is better, ES or a more traditional approach?” Of course if I’m advocating for an ES model, then that’s my answer. But I also think that it depends on what you mean by “better”.

IPF Classic Worlds 2018 is underway in Calgary. We have 16 lifters competing this year — a point of pride among RTS coaches and athletes. As such, this seems like an ideal time to write in a bit more detail about how we taper for competition.

This seemed like a great chance for me to update my thoughts a bit, so I looked into it further. It seems that, for most people, massage is effective at reducing fatigue and soreness beyond just resting. And it worked better than the other methods that were reviewed as well. That wasn’t my experience at all, so I wanted to reconcile these two observations.

There are no magic programs. Coaching is about a lot more than writing a good program. Of course writing a good program as part of being a good powerlifting coach especially in an online setting but to think that there is just writing the program is to misunderstand the process and to do a serious disservice to all the clients who put their trust in you. Read more…

Many of us treat “what works for you” like a math problem and it’s not. If I ask you “What is 247*53”, you likely don’t know the answer right off the top of your head. But with a little calculation, you can pretty easily figure out that the answer is 13091. Now if I ask you again “what is 247*53”, you don’t need to go through the same steps. You just remember that the last time the answer worked out to be 13091 and assume it’s the same answer this time. And as long as you did the math right, that’s a good assumption to make. It saves you time.

Bottom line up front: It wasn’t developed for Powerlifters and will have limited direct applicability. A much better way is to extract the useful information from it and apply the principles rather than the chart directly.

In 2013 I met Boris Sheiko at a seminar he was conducting in Vicenza, Italy. It was quite an enjoyable time and we had several interesting conversations that day, particularly over lunch. I’m sure it’s no surprise and probably goes without saying that we generally agreed on most things coaching related. But one thing that we didn’t agree on was particularly interesting. He feels that working with 90%+ loads are especially taxing to the lifter. I do not. Coach Sheiko (or whoever runs his social media accounts) recently posted about his opinion, so I wanted to weigh in with mine.

Doing a lot of training volume doesn’t matter much if you can’t recover from it. It’s not about workload, but rather the workload that you can recover from. Now from there, we can spout generalities usually in one of two varieties. We can say, “Most people aren’t working hard enough, so most likely you shouldn’t worry about it and just work harder.” Or we can say, “Recovery is the critical factor. Better to under-train than over-train. So keep training on the conservative side.”

Deloading is taking an easy week every third or fourth week, right? Well… That’s a caricature of what effective deloading looks like. In most standard cases, deload training is intended to reduce accumulated fatigue and facilitate adaptation to future training cycles.